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THE GENDER WAGE GAP IN TURKEY

The most prominent form of gender discrimination in the labor market is the gender gap in wages.Using the Wage Structure Survey, a firm-level data set, we study the gender wage gap in Turkey. Weconcentrate on formal employment as this is the jurisdiction of the Labor Code in Turkey. Althoughwomen earn 3% less than men on average, a wider look reveals important differences along the entirewage distribution. There is virtually no gender gap at the lower end of the wage distribution. Moresurprisingly, women seem to earn about 5 percent more than men at the top. Using quantile regressionswhich allow the study of the gender gap along the entire wage distribution, we find that women actuallyearn 8 percent less at the median. Moreover, at the high end of the wage distribution women earn 4.5percent less than men once we control for differences in basic labor market characteristics such aseducation and labor market experience. The decomposition results reveal the unexplained part of thegender wage gap is actually larger than that observed in raw data.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Gender wage gap, Quantile Regression, Machado-Mata Decomposition

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